Insensitive rant / friend dynamics & weight loss hoaxes =(

Monday, February 04, 2013

I have this friend who I love but she is always trying to sell me something. Most recently it is these ridiculous body wraps. Last it was these shakeology things.

The dynamics of a friendship between a larger girl and a smaller girl are...interesting. I feel bad for this girl because she is approximately 350 lbs and she works in the beauty industry (tanning, etc.) and she is always trying some scheme to lose weight, but when I go over to her house she is always serving very unhealthy foods and martinis, etc. Her pinterest board 'healthy living' is full of absolute garbage, i.e. cake made out of cake mix and diet soda (?).

So when she sent me a long email today about these wraps and how she will apply them for me and she lost 5 inches in a day and all this stuff I was so offended. The whole story behind these wraps are ridiculous - they suck the toxins out of your body and magically shrink your fat cells! *rolls eyes*

I know this sounds insensitive but one of the reasons that it offends me is that she is so unhealthy, yet she feels like she can tell me how to be healthy. How does someone a size 24 get off telling someone who is a size 4 what they should do to be small? (Although it would probably be even more offensive if someone smaller said that because then I would feel fat and disgusting.) Clearly what she is doing is not working for her. And the last shakeology thing didn't work out either.

Obviously I have some serious body image issues.

So I ignored the e-mail because although these health schemes are annoying, she is my friend and I don't want to hurt her feelings. I'm not really sure if I should say anything about her sending me stuff like this in the future, or should I just suck it up and push delete when I see these things? She probably doesn't mean to be insensitive - she probably just wants to make money.

What I would like to say is, hey what you need to do is eat right and exercise but we aren't super close and she would probably take that the wrong way. I don't want to come off as a know-it-all or make her feel bad for being a bigger girl. But I am concerned about her overall health. It's always sad to see your friends hurt themselves in this way.

I have a couple of FB friends that are selling the body by vi stuff and they just bombard FB with all their propaganda. It drives me a little crazy. And the thing that REALLY annoys me is they post all this stuff about clean eating and whole foods as if that lab rat crap is the same thing! Only once did one of them solicit me directly and I just said "no thanks. If my great grandmother wouldn't recognize the ingredients as food, I don't eat it." They haven't said anything since. I don't think there's anything wrong with saying you already have something that's working for you and you're not interested.

I think ignoring the email is probably your best idea, if you respond no matter what you say, if it isn't "Oh, sign me up" she might be offended. Have you told her about SparkPeople? I tell everyone about it if they mention to me that they want to lose weight or eat healthier. I never tell anyone if they don't mention their desire first though.